Archive for June, 2012

My friend Justin up in Vancouver brought this invention down for the Maker Faire a month or so ago. He custom made a frame and attached a CVT NuVinci hub to the unicycle. Awesome.

Video of me riding it:

I now have a J1772 EVSE Charging Station at home. My friend Ken Adelman gave me an old Avcon charger that he had saved from the dumpster. I bought a J1772 plug from tucsonev.com and wired it up.

Here’s the inside of it. The board was a little loose, so I glued it down. I unplugged the 3 inlet wires; red and black are 120v each, and the green is ground. I then screwed in plug’s wires to the terminal screws and attached the low voltage signal wire to the spot where it said to do it.

It all works great!

The next thing I’m trying to get done is some smarts for the car. I want it to watch for the pilot and proximity signal from the J1772 plug and safely turn off the charger. It is much better than my current approach, which is to turn down the charger’s amperage if it is in the middle of charging. Instead, I can have a control board and Arduino do this when it senses the proximity switch being engaged. So far, I have it all working and prototyped and need to just mount it in the car. It also has the ability to control the charger and BMS via a timer.

I got a cheap “go pro” like camera from online not too long ago. My friend Jason was getting one and said I should get one too (so I did!).

Here it is hacked onto my cyr wheel in a loose way. I need to make a better mount to get it to be firmer and give a better view of the spinner .

Over 10 years ago my friend Rob started a 20 mile unicycle ride throughout Santa Cruz. It starts down by the beach Boardwalk, rides up to UCSC campus, does some mild off road trails through Wilder park, and then finally ends with a nice cruise along “West Cliff” drive. Heck, it is even so popular that Ken made a website dedicated to it: http://robsride.com. Rob, and a group of my other uni-friends, do it nearly every Sunday.

A month or so ago marked the 10th anniversary. So I rode with my Canon 5D and did some live-riding filming.